


So live it, or you're better off dead

by EponineTheStrange (gallifreyandglowclouds)



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2013-06-06
Packaged: 2017-12-14 04:05:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/832528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyandglowclouds/pseuds/EponineTheStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Karen died 8 months ago and Matt is dealing (or not dealing) with the grief (Matt and Karen were in an established relationship before her death)</p>
            </blockquote>





	So live it, or you're better off dead

Matt’s alarm goes off. He switches it off, sits up in bed with his feet on the ground, and seriously debates whether he wants to get out of bed or curl back up under the duvet and let the pillows and mattress swallow him. 

It’s been eight months. Eight fucking months since Karen went to bed with a serious headache, and then Matt went upstairs and found her not breathing. Eight months since the doctors told him that sometimes, they can’t fix brain aneurysms when they rupture, and that she wouldn’t be opening her eyes ever again. 

Eight months since the last time he held her, and said goodbye and kissed her on the forehead like he would when she usually went to sleep. 

He hasn’t changed the flat that they shared in London one bit since she died - all the pictures are still up, as is the painting that Matt was never overly fond of. There’s her usual English Breakfast tea in the pantry, which he’ll still never drink, and a package of Jaffa Cakes in the biscuit tin that he’ll probably never eat. 

Her clothes and her jewellery, except for the few items that Caitlin and her mum wanted, still occupy a cabinet in the corner of their bedroom.  

So, essentially, their (and Matt still thinks of it as theirs, even though he lived in it before she came to live with him and he’s the only one there now) entire flat has become a massive shrine to Karen. 

He left  _Who_ six months in to their relationship, and worked on a couple movies after that, but since her passing he’s stopped working. People just backed off at first, and said things like  _we understand that you’re experiencing a lot of grief right now_ and  _call us when you feel ready to work again, we’d love to have you_ but he’s not felt ready to work at all, and the calls have stopped coming. 

The problem that Matt has is this: everything in his life has become inextricably linked to Karen. So every time he thinks about stepping on a set, his mind always snaps back to his first day shooting with Karen, which unleashes a torrent of memories that he’d rather like to keep out of his head, because he gets stupid and emotional and needs to go and cry for a little while when that happens. He walks by a fucking Starbucks -  _oh, Karen always loved her pumpkin spice lattes_ -, a Thai restaurant -  _remember when we used to give up on cooking and run across the street and get takeaway and somehow eat it while snuggled up on our couch, which will never stop smelling faintly of yellow curry? -_ and by the time he gets back to their flat he feels totally emotionally drained. 

So he spends a lot of time inside, watching TV or reading or staring at the wall, trying his absolute best to chase away the demons in his mind. 

* * *

It’s something weird that sends Matt over the edge, but also paradoxically, spurs his recovery. 

He decides that he’s going to go out for a walk - where to, he isn’t quite certain - but he gets in the lift, and then sees a woman with a baby running to catch the lift, and holds the door for her. 

Matt knows her, except for the fact that because he’s been such a recluse for the past eight months, he didn’t realise that she had had a child. 

“Congratulations,” he says, “what’s her name?” 

“Mimi,” she says, beaming. “Short for Amelia. We just brought her home a couple weeks ago.” 

Matt feels tears coming on, because he and Karen had talked about having children, and he’d imagined them in his mind so clearly, a little red-headed ginger girl with her mother’s laugh and her father’s gangly limbs and a little boy with floppy hear 

Amelia Grace. That was the name Karen had suggested. 

Matt wipes his eyes. “Congratulations,” he half-says, half-sobs, and gets out of the lift at the ground floor and walks over to the stairs and back up to his flat. The woman watches him go, a slightly concerned look in her eyes. 

He closes the door, and then collapses on the floor and bawls, because that’s fundamentally unfair, that other people are having the life that he and Karen had started to plan out together. 

His sadness soon turns to burning anger, and he stands up and goes to the kitchen and grabs a knife and holds it against his wrist. All he had to do was press hard and it’d be done. 

He’s sick of the hurting, he’s sick of knowing that he’s not going to live out his life with the only person he’d ever really truly fallen in love with. 

And then he just sort of stands there for a second, waiting for something to happen, and then nothing does. He doesn’t dig the knife in to his wrist, he just stands there with shaking hands, inches from death. 

Matt then drops the knife, and backs away from it as it clatters on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. He leans back against the kitchen counter and covers his face with his hands. 

_What the fuck is going on?_

In another manic state, he digs through the accumulated piles of crap on the coffee table and finds a journal that he’d started shortly before Karen had died (the journalling wasn’t a habit he had been able to kick from his preparations from  _Christopher and His Kind_ ).  _  
_

He starts writing furiously, and every single pent-up emotion, every day that he missed Karen so much that it chased him under the covers and inside his head, how it felt to hold her and tell her goodbye when they turned off the machines that kept her alive for the day or so after the aneurysm.

But he also writes about how he remembers her when she was alive - the way that her hair felt when he would run his fingers through it, and the curves of her hips and her smile and her laugh and her accent.

At the end of it, he collapses in to a deep, deep sleep. 

* * *

For the first time in eight months, Matt wakes up feeling oddly refreshed. He did dream about Karen - he usually does - but it was a happy dream, strangely enough. 

For him, it feels strange to feel this light. 

He pulls on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, and goes out for a walk. He starts thinking about things that were previously anathema - he needs to get some boxes and put Karen’s clothes in then, and put them in the closet or give them to a charity shop. 

He stops, because that’s probably the most logical thought and the closest to moving on from Karen’s death that he’s come to for ages. 

He looks up at the sky, and asks, “Is this you giving me a sign, Kaz?” 

Nothing happens for a little while, and then a pigeon flies over him and shits on his shoulder. 

He has no capacity to be angry, which is a stark contrast to how he was feeling before, and he breaks down laughing. People stare. 

He starts to make his way home, and mutters, “I’ll take it.” 

* * *

He drops by a moving store later that day, and picks up a ton of boxes and carefully sorts through the closet. He figures he can at least start there today. 

He keeps one jumper and the dress that he had to zip up while he was in New York. It does take him a week to finish the job, because sometimes he has to stop and cry and hold some of the old clothes, because he thinks of when she wore them last. 

(The one that she wore on their first date is the hardest one. He keeps it too.) 

He brings to Barnardo’s, because that cause was always her favourite, and the woman seems incredibly surprised at all of the designer clothes. 

Matt shrugs. “It’s what she would have wanted.” 

He throws out the Jaffa cakes, because they are so stale that he doesn’t think that birds would even want them, but he leaves the tea because he figures that someday, he might have someone over who would want English Breakfast tea. (He probably won’t drink it, but you never know.) 

There are pictures of the two of them across the mantle above the fake fireplace, which he leaves. They may or may not always be there, he realises, but for now, he likes to see and remember their times together. (Now he can do so happily, and he doesn’t feel any emotional torment when Karen pops up in his mind. She does quite frequently.) 

A month later, he calls his agent, who sets him up to audition for a play. Matt’s not sure he wants to commit to a TV series or movie quite yet, and he’s always adored stage acting. 

He reads the things that he wrote about Karen in his old journals, and it gives him relief and catharsis that he can’t fathom. He’s not sure why he decided to move on, or what happened on that day that snapped him out of the spiral. 

All he knows is that there’s light again, which is good enough for him. 


End file.
